Sensual Re-Readings: Gender, Sensibility, and the Classes of Flânerie

Abstract

As ambivalent hero of the urban imaginary of the nineteenth century, the flâneur enjoys the licence to loiter in the streets and look at the spectacle of the crowds and the hall of mirrors of the city scene. However, feminist inquiry has dislocated the flâneur’s panoramic embrace of sites/sights of authority, and reconfigured the gendered mastery of urban perception by the all-seeing voyeur. Benjaminian approaches have focused on the production of art in an age of mass consumption and the flâneur’s seduction by the erotics of capitalist consumption and commodity fetishism. Building on both interpretations, this article performs sensual re-readings of novels and essays by Balzac, Vallès, and Colette, in order to recapture the rich potential of the senses in the activities of walking, feeling, and representing the city. The embodied experience of boundaries undoes three hierarchies: the gendered and class divisions of social spheres, and the division of the senses into higher and lower faculties.